Community & Solitude: A Guest Post Charlotte Wood

A journey of the self through solitude. Quiet and contemplative, written with deceptively simple and straightforward prose, Stone Yard Devotional is a tender meditation on hope and humanity from an acclaimed author. Read on for an exclusive essay from Charlotte Wood on writing Stone Yard Devotional.

I started my novel Stone Yard Devotional before the pandemic arrived, and continued writing through the fear and isolation of that lockdown time.

The book came slowly, elements of my own life and country childhood in Australia merging with an entirely invented story of a contemplative community of Catholic nuns. As the novel came together in the form of a diary or journal, I saw that it revealed some of my recurring preoccupations: friendships and rivalries between women, the question of how to live harmoniously in a group, and the tension between community and solitude.

While I don’t plan my novels in advance, I did know something of what I wanted – to grip the writing less tightly than I had in previous books. I wanted to trust my reader more. Worn down by politics and the world’s aggression, I was tired of the impulse to preach or harp. I aimed for a bone-clean, understated novel. I wanted to invite readers in to a calm and spacious consideration of their own life as they joined my narrator in hers.

As I wrote, the book began to examine the moral challenge of political despair, the ethics of retreat versus activism, and questions about how we in societies make outcasts of certain people – and the cost of that to all of us.

It felt to me as if I began the book about ten times, writing into one seam, coming to a dead end and crawling out backwards, writing away and then throwing it out, starting again. For a couple of years I kept writing, each day with the feeling that I hadn’t even begun. In this very halting way, the novel slowly formed itself and then fell into its shape quite quickly towards the end of the process.

As I finished my first draft I was rocked by a cancer diagnosis arriving for me and two of my sisters at the same time. When treatment was over for all three of us I felt stronger, but also that my life had been dipped in acid, a substance that had burned away anything inessential or trivial and left only the most fundamental structures remaining. My life had caught up with what the book was already trying to do, and that experience consolidated my urgent desire to write a book of depth and precision, a book that is restful but unsentimental, and full of love.

I’ve been stunned and grateful at the response, and especially that it has found such love outside Australia. The UK Booker Prize shortlisting was followed by great enthusiasm in the US, with incredibly generous reviews and book-of-the-year listings. Most precious are the responses I’ve had from individual readers, many of whom tell me the book has brought them solace in a time of great turmoil. These are readers not looking for escapism but for depth, beauty and calm consideration of important things; I’m honoured if they have found that in my work.

Charlotte Wood